A couple of cheerful and enterprising girls have had a demountable shed built in the front yard of their house and styled it as a photographic studio. Their target market was "mums and bubs". Having engaging people skills and doing good camera work was not enough to prevail in the "retirement village" demographic of Noosa - not enough customers. Commercial photography is a tough gig.

I like this, the girl in the front makes this for me. Her being where she is, gives it that little lift.

Must have been a bit of soul searching from them as to why their venture didn't succeed, at least they are still young and it would have been a good learning curve for them. One they no doubt didn't wish for, but...

Mick, you know about the path of photographic commerce leading often to disappointment. I've been asked many times by hopefuls with good camera skills "When do I turn pro?" I always say "After you take a one year course in small business administration!" The camera work is easy compared to keeping the pipeline flowing every day all day with new customers.

Yes I do know about the path required to running a business; rather fortunately, I married a numbers woman.

The real funny thing is that I have a quite nice darkroom, which rather unbelievably, was funded, in the main, from photographic jobs done on the side in spare time. Colour negative developing along with the prints obtained from them, were where some reasonably good money lay in the photographic industry. Going out and shooting was hard work, developing negatives and doing good colour prints was also hard work. I concentrated on the part of photography that was consistently returning over and above running costs; colour printing.

I started kicking goals, so to speak, once I picked up a Durst Printo paper processor. Running RA4 paper through it, doing a hand wash then finishing with a paper dryer allowing me to have a semi automated darkroom, meant I was able to churn out some serious numbers of colour prints. Mind you, one did have to get correct colour, correct density, along with sometimes judicious cropping of their negatives; or at least have those parameters correct in the mind of the customer.

If those ladies are still motivated once they pick themselves up off the floor, I'm sure they will eventually find something they like doing that also gives them a livable income; if they are lucky as well as being good, they may also make a tidy profit.